Quantitative Physiology is physiology rewritten as systems and equations. The statewide description covers quantitative modelling of organ system physiology — the nervous system, the cardiovascular system and the respiratory system — with students working quantitative problems.
⚠⚠ This is the course that makes an engineer useful in a hospital or a device company. A physiologist describes what the heart does; this course asks you to predict it from a compartment model and a set of boundary conditions, which is what designing a ventilator, a pacemaker or a dialysis machine actually requires.
Carried by two Florida public institutions.
Named on the Biomedical Engineer career path. ⚠ It is the single best preparation in the degree for graduate study, and for the modelling and simulation work that device companies and clinical research groups actually hire for.
⚠⚠ And a word about level, because it applies to every course in this prefix. O*NET reports that only 43% of employers treat a bachelor’s as sufficient for this occupation, against 26% naming a master’s and 13% a doctorate — by a wide margin the highest graduate expectation of any engineering discipline. Choose your upper-level courses with that in mind: the instrumentation, signals and imaging cluster is the most employable at bachelor’s level, while the tissue, neural and BioMEMS cluster largely assumes you intend to continue.
The statewide gate reads “PCB 3XXX Cell and System Physiology, MAP2302”. A masked number like 3XXX usually can be recovered, because the writer normally follows it with the course’s real title. Searching every statewide PCB title for “Cell and System Physiology” returns nothing. The closest real numbers are PCB3203 and PCB3204, both titled Cell Physiology.
⚠⚠ So the honest position is that this gate cannot be looked up, and the guide will not invent a resolution. Differential equations (MAP2302) is real and is enforced. For the physiology requirement, read your own catalogue.
UF calls it Quantitative Physiology and USF Engineering Physiology. Same subject, and USF’s title is arguably the more descriptive — this is physiology taught for engineers rather than a mathematics course about the body. With only two carriers, plan on sending a syllabus rather than a course number if you transfer.
The course uses them from the first weeks and does not teach them. Most students last met them a year or more earlier. A few hours on systems of first-order equations, eigenvalues and numerical solution is the highest-return preparation available for this course.
Biomedical engineering is awarded at bachelor’s level by six Florida public institutions in five cities: UF (115 degrees a year), FIU (79), Florida State (36), USF (29), Florida Gulf Coast (21) and Florida A&M (4). Florida State and Florida A&M share the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering, one joint college in Tallahassee, which is why their records in this prefix are identical down to the title.
⚠⚠ UCF and FAU award biomedical engineering at master’s and doctoral level and no bachelor’s at all, and UNF and Florida Polytechnic carry courses in the prefix without awarding the degree. St. Petersburg College is the only Florida College System institution carrying any BME course.
⚠ So a carrier count in this prefix overstates how many independent programmes exist — a course carried by “FAMU and FSU” is one programme’s course. Read anything stated here about content as a description of a small number of specific curricula rather than a Florida-wide norm. The Biomedical Engineer career path sets out what this means for choosing where to study.
This repository checks every course-looking token in a statewide prerequisite against who actually carries that course. The BME prefix returns the worst result measured anywhere in Florida: of 100 active undergraduate records, 75 name at least one course in their prerequisite field, and fifteen of those 75 — one in five — name a course that no Florida public institution carries. The same test on criminal justice returns about 2%.
⚠⚠ The likeliest cause is age, not carelessness. Biomedical engineering is Florida’s newest and fastest-growing engineering discipline; its programmes were built recently and renumbered as they matured, and the statewide record kept the numbers that were proposed, used briefly or retired along the way. The practical consequence is simply that in this prefix you should read the gate from your own institution’s catalogue every time.
⚠⚠ Check that your programme is accredited by ABET’s ENGINEERING Accreditation Commission, not the engineering technology commission — the difference is two extra years of experience toward a Professional Engineer licence, and accreditation attaches to a named programme at a named institution rather than to a course list.
Few biomedical engineers license: device manufacturing falls under the industrial exemption. ⚠ The exception is clinical engineering in hospitals and healthcare facility work. Sit the FE examination in your final year regardless — it is inexpensive as a student and expensive to recreate later. Under s. 471.013(1)(a), Florida Statutes, an approved engineering curriculum needs four years of qualifying experience toward the PE.
Generated September 19, 2026 · Updated September 19, 2026